As for Vulkan, there is also open source AMDVLK and you can have both installed (courtesy of vulkan-icd-loader, provided by vulkan-sdk in Slackware which uses json files in /usr/share/vulkan/icd.d which you can change with an environment variable, for example VK_ICD_FILENAMES="/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/amd_icd64.json" set at invocation time will tell the application to use AMDVLK)

Some games work better, and correctly with Mesa RADV vulkan but others work better with AMDVLK. For example, my Wolfenstein: Youngblood running through Proton.

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The Phoronix website has a lot of great data on Linux Gaming and they claim even accelerated 3D works best with the in-kernel drivers for AMD. I've been a fairly rabid gamer on Linux ever since LOKI circa 2000, almost 20 years now, but I have also been a loyal nVidia customer who is now considering AMD/Ati. Steam is a huge benefit and runs a custom Codeweavers Wine with deep Vulkan (DirectX) support but so far is best with version 10 and later but D9VK is finally getting there even though DX9 itself had some problems that won't ever likely go away. Because of that OpenGL is often better for games from that era.

In Steam one needs to check the boxes for beta, Proton, and SteamPlay to get the most support for non-native gaming. Many are at least as good as running those same games in Windows 7 (sorry, I am never installing a newer version of windows). It may turn out that Steam is best for Wine customized by default for gaming and Wine alone best for Office stuff. In any case gaming on Linux with AMD graphics has never been so good. It's been great on nVidia for a long time but may get eclipsed by AMD very soon, since the 5.4.x kernel family is looking extremely promising especially for AMD.

Cheers for the replies folks, it has been an interesting thread and certainly enough to look into alot more. I was introduced to Linux at a fairly young age but again never really used it more than a desktop experience or for using it to capture satellite data or (what ever tickled my fancy), for Gaming I used what ever was at hand PS/Xbox/Nintendo etc I suppose now I can start to pull the finger out and buy some more games ... I always thought Gaming was the last Hurdle for Linux to be more in the mainstream of generic users, lets hope the future is even more bright for Nvidia/AMD and linux

Humble Bundle has a variety of game release methods, some binary downloads, some Steam keys, some other. As mentioned elsewhere here, Steam's Proton version of WINE (Steam Play), works quite well. For those titles a bt glitchy (sometimes a Steam client breaks compatibilty, as in Borderlands and Fallout New Vegas), I run I single "wine-steam" prefix for those, since steam needs a few tweaks in WINE. Everything else gets lumped together, except for Skyrim since that's heavily modded.

Mesa has openCL 1.1 and if you run BOINC and other newer compute projects, that is insufficient, works on just a few GPUs. For the same OpenCL performance Nvidia has (CUDA and OpenCL are provided), you will need AMDGPU-PRO. However, with the opensource ROCm, looks like that has changed.